Understanding Land Use Change

Sustainable land use is seen as one of the key factors for a "Great Transformation" towards sustainability. Currently, about 55 hectares of land are "consumed" every day in Germany for new buildings and infrastructure. The German government wants to reduce this figure to less than 30 hectares per day by 2030. In 2050, there should even be zero at the end. To achieve this, a fundamental understanding of land use in Germany is needed. Although the course of new land use over time shows a reduction, there is no discernible trend towards a circular land economy.

In addition to land use, soil sealing and unsealing must also be considered. Soils are central to the survival of humankind and the preservation of biodiversity. They contribute to the percolation of rainwater and support its evaporation, which is important for both cooling the (urban) climate and increasing humidity. The increasing sealing of surfaces in the course of urbanisation and industrialisation leads to a detrimental change in the nature of soils. Unsealing can counteract these negative effects. It is therefore necessary to take unsealing measures aimed at restoring soil functions and adapting to climate change. 

To this end, the IOER has quantified open space development, construction land reserves and the inner development potential of cities. Not least within the framework of the IOER Research Data Centre (IOER-FDZ), it is working on recognising development patterns and cause-effect relationships, automatically collecting information on previous settlement and open space development and identifying undesirable development paths by means of analyses, modelling and simulations. 
 

Martin Behnisch is primarily concerned with sustainable settlement and open space development, in particular with the modelling and simulation of processes of land use, urban sprawl and land use competition. He is particularly interested in systematically utilising the concepts of multidimensional data analysis, data mining and knowledge discovery already established in computer science for spatial planning and spatial and environmental science.

Mathias Jehling

Marco Neubert deals with long-term land use changes in near-natural areas such as the Saxon Switzerland National Park region, the Ore Mountains, the Eichsfeld or the inner-German border region. The aim of the research is to analyse and understand the driving forces and effects of land use changes.

Andreas Blum works on social science aspects of resource utilisation in the development of the built environment. It is jointly responsible for conducting and analysing the nationwide building land survey with a focus on inner-city development.